


A Rotting Thing at the Turn of the Path

by BurgerBurgerBurger



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Femslash, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Recovery, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24650278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurgerBurgerBurger/pseuds/BurgerBurgerBurger
Summary: She has never been so lonely in her life, if this unnatural, unwanted second chance even qualifies as such.
Relationships: Castaspella/Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner (She-Ra)
Comments: 162
Kudos: 221





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Major Season 5 She-Ra spoilers! Please do not read this if you haven't finished the series! TW for child abuse, violence, and eventual sex. Shadow Weaver has not yet been redeemed. The updates on this fic will be infrequent, but you can expect between 3-5 chapters in total. I adore all supportive comments with a passion! 
> 
> This is my love letter to the cast and crew of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. This show would have changed my life growing up, and I'm so grateful they brought it into the world.

> Darling, remember what we saw
> 
> that beautiful summer morning
> 
> a rotting thing at the turn of the path
> 
> on a bed that was sown with pebbles
> 
> with its legs in the air like a woman ready
> 
> burning and sweating it opened
> 
> in a cynical offhand way
> 
> a womb exhaling poison.
> 
> The sun shone on this rottenness
> 
> cooking it to the point
> 
> Great Nature got back a hundred ways
> 
> what it had joined as one
> 
> -Charles Baudelaire, "A Carcass"

×××

There are thousands of cruelties she could recall: a sliding scale of snide remarks that crescendo into unspeakable brutalities done by the hands of others. 

But the cruelest of these is the betrayal of her own body: every atom so confidently split from her sisters, her organs burnt to eternal ash, and then, wholly without her heart's consent, Shadow Weaver's form stitches itself back together.

×××

The first thing she hears is the sound of her own sobbing, a rattling, wheezing cough like she's forgotten how to breathe, and perhaps she has. 

The first thing she feels is the chill of morning dew on her bare flesh, and the first thing she sees is pink dawn light blanketing the lush grass. 

The first thing she smells and tastes is rich, wet soil, the flavor of petrichor musky on her tongue. It grates against her molars, coating her disfigured lips, and she heaves, weak as a newborn fawn, until darkness claims her again.

×××

When her senses return in full and she realizes that she has been reborn, naked and powerless, a writhing, gasping monstrosity wallowing in Etheria's dirt, she begins to weep in earnest.

All her old scars are there, blanketed by new burns, the remnant of her explosive demise.

She did not ask for this, another violation.

×××

In the months that follow, Shadow Weaver considers that there was a flaw in her self-destruct, that she didn't account for the sheer volume of energy required to permanently decorporealize. But eventually she rules this out too. She expended her reserves down to their dying breaths, and was mercifully no more. 

Then some vestige-- she knows not what: She-Ra's mysterious powers, the Heart of Etheria, her own Dark Magic, Adora's inconvenient, boundless love-- brought her back. 

She feels an illness inside her, wriggling like worms on pavement, an emptiness where the last fragment of her powers used to reside. It is like a hole in the ground where a fertile thing used to grow.

×××

The villager who finds her has red feathers on his head, some botched approximation of a cardinal, and a shortbow and quiver slung across his back. 

She tries to scream, to rise and lunge at him, to pray his arrow flies true and splits her heart, but she collapses naked in the forest, and the man has pity in his eyes.

As he wraps his cloak around her maimed shoulders, she thinks, _I will kill him for this._

×××

When they first give her a mirror she shatters it. 

The father shepherds his children outside of their small home, and the mother flinches away with a cry as the glass splinters around her wooden wardrobe.

Shadow Weaver's bloody fist smashes into the mirror again and again, as rhythmic as a heart that shouldn't beat: Monstrous. Monstrous. Monstrous.

×××

They do not cast her out and this, she thinks, is most irrational. _It's no wonder these people are so easy to conquer._

They feed her simple things like bread and fruit, and do not ask many questions except, "Are you hungry? Would you like milk or water?" She says nothing.

They give her a roughspun brown dress, a hand-me-down of the mother's, that is far too short for her tall frame. It leaves her knobbly knees bare when she sits with them at the low table. The children, little fledgling birds, peek up at her over their plates, curious and terrified.

Her body, the disintegrated traitor that it is, is now hairless, pockmarked by blistering burns that haven't healed. Her beautiful black hair, the only beautiful thing left about her, is gone. The scars from the Spell of Obtainment remain, criss-crossing her body from toe to tip: deep, sickly grey spiderwebs. Her cleft lip remains and her sharp teeth show if she doesn't make a proper effort to close her mouth.

She can feel herself bleeding through the dress as the scratchy fabric scrapes across her back. The pain of her body is unbearable, the fact that it exists at all an insult.

"Does aloe vera grow in this region?" she rasps on the second day. 

"Yes," says the mother, her neck feathers ruffled.

She wants to leave the house, to be away from their beady eyes and pity, but her legs cannot hold her meager weight. She can barely walk three steps without her vision curtaining at the edges, though she is no stranger to chronic pain.

"Gather it. As much as you can carry."

×××

Her hair is spiky fuzz by the time a Princess is finally called to intervene for the cardinal family. She refuses to tell them her name or how she came to be dying in their hunting grounds or why she's digging up their flower beds, transplanting their tulips in favor of something more useful. She is a quiet, creeping houseguest; she eats what they give her, and prefers to sleep beneath the stars when the weather is good. Otherwise, she curls into herself on a small pallet by the fireplace and ignores the life around her, or she gathers plants in the forest if she feels strong enough.

Still, she has overstayed her welcome in these crowded quarters. She never wants to see the princesses again, least of all Adora and her shadow, Catra, but a small piece of her feels scorned that a lesser one is sent to investigate.

"This is oleander," says the blonde, her tan hands brushing through the flowers in the garden. "It's toxic and probably shouldn't be out here with your herbs."

"Those belong to me," says Shadow Weaver, and she cannot help but smile when Perfuma's mouth hangs wide.

×××

She did not know her father, but she knows she had two siblings: an elder sister and younger brother. They did not resemble each other, except for sharing their mother's fangs. 

They grew up poor and unsupervised, hungry most nights, sometimes banished from their single bedroom home if their mother had company, but at least they would have coin the next morning. 

Her sister was strong and lithe, quick and slick and roguish, an outstanding thief. She tried to teach her, but she was gangly and uncoordinated and bookish. Even her brother, two years younger, showed more physical prowess than she did, viper-fast and dexterous.

They made mother happy and she did not, even when she tried to show her that she learned to read all by herself. She listened to the school teachers through open windows, her skinny body hidden in the thorny bushes, and stole the water-stained books they threw away. She taught herself to write, and do simple arithmetic.

"I can learn," she whispered to herself in the alley behind the school.

When she returned home empty-handed, explaining lofty concepts like division and grammar, mother slapped her hard across the face.

"What good is reading?" mother spat. "We can't eat words."

Her siblings stole food and jewelry, things that mattered, and learned to mock her for such useless proclivities.

×××

In typical, superfluous Bright Moon fashion, it is a whole event when she returns to the castle. A month has passed since her death, she estimates, but the princesses of Etheria still cling to one another, revisiting their own territories alone only as frequently as necessary, usually with a companion in tow, another parasite, for reasons Shadow Weaver cannot understand. They are always in each other's company, the whole hodgepodge rainbow of them.

Castaspella is there too, neglecting her duties in Mystacor again. She folds her arms around herself, looking concerned in the lush green courtyard as the guards escort Shadow Weaver and Perfuma. Castaspella's flair for the dramatic is unusually gratifying when the shock of recognition shoots up her smooth face and she gasps, one well-manicured hand flying to her lips.

They have all seen her true face now, even worse than it was when she covered it with a mask, the blisters half-healed, shiny white starbursts across a grey expanse. Shadow Weaver's stomach twists in shame and agony: she hates her ugliness, her normalcy. Her only solace is that they cringe when they look at her; her face brings them just as much pain. 

Perfuma's voice shakes, "I didn't know where else to go." She looks to Glimmer, whose pink eyes are wide in shock, her fingers digging into Bow's arm.

There are no hugs, not even from Adora. No warm welcome or expression of gratitude. No one even has the decency to ask what happened, or how or why. Shadow Weaver stands in the half-circle of her once-enemies, once-allies, magicless and crippled and disfigured, and drawls, "Good to see you too."

Only Catra responds, surprising in her silence: there is none of her normal screaming or scowling or rage. She quivers, tears streaming down her face, a terrified creature, and staggers back. She sprints to the castle so quickly that not even her red-maned cat can keep up. Adora follows after her in the slow, rigid march of a shell-shocked soldier.

×××

When she was nine, a nameless man behind a fruit stand caught her stealing, and bashed out two of her baby teeth with a cudgel that he kept handy for those exact purposes. He screamed and swore and spat at her, even as she lay dazed on her back, blood soaking her tunic and the cobblestones.

Her lips were never the same after that, always slightly cleft on the left side where she thinks she must have bit herself when the cudgel struck.

"That's what you get for being too slow, isn't it?" her mother drawled. "Maybe you'll talk less now." 

The wound got infected, rotten and feverish; it took years to properly seal. As she laid outside beneath the stars, her blood boiling, the ache of her wound throbbing behind her eyes, she liked to imagine that her father was already dead. No living man, good or evil, would leave her to this life.

She had to learn to talk again, to suppress the lisping impediment from her injury. She practiced with the flowers and bushes, a friendly, captive audience-- not her family, never her family-- and listened beneath the school's open windows. She worked until her diction became crisp and precise. 

When she was fourteen she fled to Mystacor and named herself Light Spinner. She spoke eloquently and was hungry for knowledge like no other student in her class. She always wore a veil.

×××

They didn't touch her room, the _prison_ , Angella called it, or what few possessions she left behind in the days before Horde Prime's invasion. The bed, the sofa, the table and chairs are all untouched, lush and gaudy like all things Bright Moon. She supposes it's better than sleeping curled up among tree roots, or being woken by the small cardinal boy's beady eyes staring from across the room. At least here she has some shelter, some privacy.

There is a large crack up the southern wall, one that reaches nearly to the ceiling, but Bow quietly assured her that the builders had evaluated its integrity. She cares little for these reassurances: let the castle of Bright Moon crush her. The whole of the world remains unstable, cities on the brink of collapse, structural instabilities at every turn. The princesses work hard to fix these issues, Bow tells her, but Horde Prime's canyons ran deep and Etheria still trembles as she heals.

She experiences her first earthquake early the next morning, jolted awake alone in her bed. The crack grows and she watches, sheets balled in her fist.

×××

She hardly remembers Castaspella in the early days of Mystacor, so enraptured was she by Micah's magical prowess, his dynamic personality. She recalls some little sister, an afterthought, only useful in theory until she displayed her lack of aptitude. Shadow Weaver thinks it criminal that such a dull, slow learner could rise to the position of Head Sorceress; no doubt she is as fearful and weak-spined as her predecessors. 

If Castaspella demonstrated any ambition or cunning she could have begrudgingly given her some measure of respect-- even the weak could climb high under the cover of darkness-- but she knits and shares meals with the children and laughs at all of their most asinine jokes. 

_Even my shadow constructs defeated you, weak little woman._

Shadow Weaver sees how Castaspella smothers her niece, the divine sorceress queen, the only child with power worth her attention. She dotes and pries with all of them, more slowly with Catra, whose tail sometimes bristles at the attention, but she collects them all around her in some form or fashion, a little army of traumatized teenagers. 

They never spoke even once when they both occupied Mystacor. She was called Light Spinner then, though she always favored shadows, and was fifteen years her senior. She never taught the younger children-- Norwyn said her methods were too harsh and impatient, one of the few things they agreed upon-- and Castaspella lacked all of Micah's gravitational pull.

Shadow Weaver watches as she smiles, broad and full, surrounded by the children, still lacking that sharpened-steel quality, that galvanized backbone that the Head Sorceress should have. When their eyes meet, Shadow Weaver scoffs and removes herself from the room. She can feel Castaspella's eyes boring into her back.

×××

The first time they try to share a meal together like some convoluted, patchwork family, it is Glimmer's idea and Glimmer's fault when it goes awry. 

There is a lull in the conversation between Micah and Bow, a taut rope of tension and wine glasses raised to closed lips, and Shadow Weaver blinks in quiet agony. She wishes they would have left her alone to eat in peace. She doesn't want to be near any of them, and sees on Adora and Catra's glowering faces that they share the sentiment.

"What did it feel like," Glimmer asks her, "dying?"

Bow chokes mid-sip on his wine, some cheap red vintage Castaspella brought from Mystacor. Micah pats his back heartily, cringing as he splutters. Castaspella stares wide-eyed at her niece, then at Adora and Catra, who have gone still across the table, their hunger suddenly diminished.

Shadow Weaver blots at her mutilated lips with the napkin in her lap. The moment she stepped into the dining room with its tense, practiced niceties, she knew the others would collapse under the weight of her presence. This plot to bind them all together is nothing but wasted effort. Glimmer insists she is not a prisoner any longer, but she they do not trust her and never will.

She says, "It was quite gratifying saving the world."

Catra scoffs, her sharp little teeth bared. Adora's hand rests on her forearm, unnoticed.

"You did one good thing in your entire life and it fucking killed you," Catra sneers. "Dying doesn't undo until all the harm you did." 

Castaspella shifts in her seat as if taking a defensive posture, and Shadow Weaver wants to laugh. _What am I going to do, Castaspella? My magic is gone._

"Catra," warns Adora in a voice meant for her alone.

"You're quite right, Catra. I shall have to live the rest of my days as Bright Moon's slave," she says, "to make up for hurting your feelings."

"My _feelings_?" she hisses. Her cropped hair stands on edge as she rises from her chair, half-crouching. Adora rises beside her, hand on her stomach, but doesn't stop her. "You abused me every single day of my life! You abused all of us-"

Shadow Weaver does not raise her voice, "I kept you alive in the face of adversity. You were an orphan who survived on my mercy and kindness alone."

"You had no mercy or kindness, and you never took care of us-" she stops short, sucking in a quivering breath. The room is silent. "I'm done with this." She picks up her porcelain plate and Adora does the same with a pained expression.

"Allow me," Shadow Weaver smiles sarcastically, and she rises in a graceful sweep, reaching out for both of them. She takes Adora's plate, and clutches Catra's wrist.

Catra's half-empty plate drops to the table and shatters, her whole body rigid, eyes wide as saucers. Shadow Weaver smiles again; she has not lost her touch.

"Stop it!" Adora shouts amid the screech of chairs pushing back, a cacophony of unhappy voices calling names.

The violence of the room surges, Catra locked in her terrified stasis, but of all people at its peak, it is Castaspella who throws Shadow Weaver through the door.

×××

Her head slams against the stonework in the hallway, a hundred pounds of pressure on her ribcage, the force of magic crushing her lungs. Castaspella follows her in sharp, staccato steps, her arm outstretched to maintain the spell. She moves so quickly Shadow Weaver can barely process what's happening, and then elegant Castaspella wraps her beautifully painted fingernails around her throat.

"If you ever touch her again, I will take your hand," she breathes. "You reek of resentment and decay, but I refuse your rot. You will not drag those girls into your pit."

The spell holds Shadow Weaver against the wall, toes scuffling uselessly against the tiles, her visage a terrified mask. Now her raw terror is so plain on her wretched face, puckered and canyoned by arcane scars. Even as she chokes, she thinks of how hideous she must appear.

There is no facade for either of them. Her pupils, the split things that they are, flit across Castaspella's furious face, her perfect white teeth bared. 

She is pinned, stuck to the wall, her atrophied body too weak to put up a fight. She chokes, she quivers: the spell caught her off guard, a thunderclap between her ears. She is helpless to do anything against Castaspella's power.

_A tidal wave, an earthquake._ There is no precision in her magic, but it yawns, deep and endless and unfathomable. Her saccharine smiles a single, untuned violin that belies her majesty: the full orchestra unleashed into a rousing, masterful overture.

"You will not touch anyone without their explicit consent. Do you understand?"

Shadow Weaver attempts to nod, a feeble motion, as the doors from the kitchen burst open again.

Micah calmly approaches. "Casta," he says.

She obeys his tacit command immediately, releasing Shadow Weaver's throat and dropping her spell. She slumps to the floor, gasping and aching, and balls her hands into tight fists to stop their shaking. Shadow Weaver has seen such violence in her life, much of it both earned and expected, even this outburst from Castaspella. But the absence of sound, the vacuum of her mercy, leaves Shadow Weaver shaken to the core.

The siblings look down on her with their beautiful, brown eyes and symmetrical faces and their powerful magic, and she wishes again that she had simply stayed dead. The silence is unbearable.

They leave her like a puddle on the floor.

×××

Hordak is always around, his hair dyed black again, or perhaps that is his natural color and it's grown out. She doesn't care to ask. They leer at each other from across the courtyard until the other Hordak, Wrong Hordak, tugs at his hand, all naive enthusiasm, and they return to the machine shop where Entrapta waits with motor oil in her hair, loose wiring wrapped around her fingers like rings.

Somehow the princesses do not question Hordak's presence despite all the torment he inflicted upon them. They welcome him and his bumbling brother.

The sun beats down on her, and Shadow Weaver cannot fathom how he tolerates this meandering copy of himself. She thinks, _If I had a clone, I would kill her._

×××

"So is she like... immortal now?" Scorpia asks. She sits on a bench beside Perfuma in the Bright Moon greenhouse, thick with overgrown vines and unpruned saplings.

Shadow Weaver slinks between the foliage in silence, her gnarled lips twisting in displeasure. She grew sick of her gloomy room, and hoped to keep herself occupied in the greenhouse until someone decided that it was against the rules for her to be entertained. It was only a matter of time before Glimmer or Adora or Castaspella sent her away, so she decided to allow herself a small rebellion, to cultivate her long-ignored gardening hobby again.

But her old greenhouse isn't empty, and now they speak of her. 

"No, I don't think so, at least," Perfuma adjusts her wide-brimmed hat.

No one hears Shadow Weaver when she doesn't want them to and, mercifully, the guards didn't follow her inside. It has been three months since she died and, though her leash has grown in length, they follow her closely at night.

"She's more like a saprophyte. She's never thrived in sunshine and doesn't photosynthesize like other plants, but sustains herself on decaying organic matter."

"Mmhmm. Yeah, I know some of those words."

Perfuma smiles up at her, laying a dirty hand on her knee. "Like a mushroom, or a mold."

"You're so smart," says Scorpia, and she leans down to kiss her, no hesitation or desperation, only a comfortable, practiced motion. Shadow Weaver clenches her jaw; their tenderness disgusts her more than their words.

Perfuma smiles against her lips, "I have a knack for plant analogies, that's true."

"Do you think she'll be okay here? With Catra and everyone?"

Scorpia speaks with such reverence in her voice-- for _Catra_ of all people-- that Shadow Weaver is certain Perfuma's rare anger will flair, jealous and cutting. So stupid of the Force Captain to lace her voice with love for another when Perfuma's breath still ghosts across her lips. She will certainly be punished for letting her affection stray.

But Perfuma readjusts her wide-brimmed hat again, and softly wipes a smudge of dirt away from Scorpia's cheek, a crumbly brown trail she left only moments before.

"I think so. She can still grow flowers."

Shadow Weaver tenses, her skin burning hot, and turns back to the castle. There is nothing for her in the greenhouse today.

×××

At night she wanders the castle's halls, restless and teeming with unspent energy, tailed by two guards who trudge ungracefully behind her, their armor echoing like thunder down the corridors. She hates the way they ruin her silence, her contemplation, and her soft footfalls quicken around a corner in a futile effort to lose them.

Castaspella stands before her in the hallway lined with stone reliefs of Bright Moon's royalty, no High Sorceress gown or halo in sight, only a navy robe draped over her silk pajamas. She stands in a shaft of moonlight and wraps her arms more tightly around herself, her lips pursed at the interruption. Her dark eyes flick to the guards, a hint of agitation tugging at her mouth.

"At least now you won't be sneaking up on anyone," says Castaspella. Her eyes return to Queen Angella's unfeeling, marble face.

Shadow Weaver scoffs, grateful she hasn't stepped into the light. A warmth spreads to her mangled cheeks, an ashen blush beneath pearly scars. The last thing she needs right now is another tongue-lashing from a sorceress whose spells are wild gouges and sloppy noise, her greatest gift her raw power. She has none of Micah's finesse but a surplus of condescension. 

"I wasn't sneaking," she drawls, her voice gravelly from disuse.

She clenches her hands into feeble fists, quivering with leftover embarrassment from their last exchange. It had been months of solitude and shame since that awful dinner, left in a pile of pitchblack despair, a stain in the hallway. Shadow Weaver wants nothing to do with her.

"Is there something you need?" Castaspella does not look at her, only the winged statue, alone in the moonlight with a relic of her dead sister-in-law.

"Only one of us lives here," Shadow Weaver says. "Don't you have business in Mystacor? Or are you too busy enjoying a sleepover with all your friends?"

Castaspella's robe slips off of her shoulder, the pale skin of her neck milky in the dim light. Her hair falls in waves around her and she readjusts her robe with a sigh. She looks disheveled, as sloppy as her spellwork.

They were in the woods when they were last alone, Shadow Weaver masked and mysterious, and Castaspella all mint and starlight. She touched her shoulder, her hand, her hip, and whispered of the First Ones and their stolen magic. Brown eyes widened, receptive and mistrusting in equal measure, so easy to manipulate in her desire to protect her family of misfits. So short-sighted: unable to see the forest for the trees.

They shook hands, the only time she didn't scorn Shadow Weaver's touch. She listened at first; she trusted enough to threaten retribution.

Castaspella said, "But if you try anything, I won't hesitate to strike you down." And months later she made good on her promise, unflinching and sure-footed.

But her heat is gone now, a campfire burned too long, brittle and choking on its own smoke. Her voice is soft when she murmurs, "Go away."

"I can't leave," Shadow Weaver hisses. "I'm a prisoner here."

She tilts her head up to Angella, her eyebrows knit together in anguish, and calmly replies, "That's more than you deserve."

Shadow Weaver swallows thickly. Nothing ever changes. She knows what they must say about her: Shadow Weaver is a miasma. A grey void, a sore thumb lurking nearby in judgmental silence where nothing green takes root. They tolerate her for her utility, her sacrifice, her knowledge. They leave her alone because they don't know what to do with her, her very presence a burden. But neither will they let her go. Castaspella is just the same, poisoned by Catra's oversimplifications and lies.

Shadow Weaver's face warps into a snarl, hostile and grotesque, and her shoulders hunch forward to protect her heart. She spins on her heel, slippers twisting beneath her, and pushes between the guards before they have a chance to move.

Before she rounds the corner to her prison, she turns back- because she _always_ turns back, she must have the last word and drown this wave of shame before it eats what's left of her- and hates the unsteadiness in her voice as she says, "I never asked for any of this."

Castaspella finally has the decency to look at her, and the pity on her face shines brighter than the moonlight in her hair, her arms wrapped around her chest in a lonely embrace, so sorrowful that Shadow Weaver wishes she said nothing at all.

×××

The second time she looks in a mirror she is alone. She has caught her reflection in passing, split-pupil green eyes sweeping quickly away from the shock of her missing mask. The red metal was her shield and an extension of herself, hard and unforgiving, a comfort. It is far too late to cover herself: it would simply betray her own discomfort and she will not give them more fodder to use against her.

She eats more regularly now, always alone in her room where no one can see her little fangs, perfectly visible through her damaged, cleft lips, and her skin is less sallow and gaunt for it. But for what purpose? This thing she sees before her is not herself; it cannot be. As if she occupies a grey body that is meant to be dead, calcified and rotten and still shambling forward with no end in sight.

Her short hair bothers her the most, her newest deformity. No longer does it float delicately behind her like gossamer spider's silk, no longer does it meld into the darkness she commands. It is limp and brittle, and tickles her pointed ears, an insult on injury. Her hair used to be the most beautiful thing about her, her favorite thing: she always believed she inherited her hair from her father, thick and black and luscious, not her mother's mousy brown.

Brightmoon is gaudy and simpering- it lacks the clean elegance of Mystacor- but it instills a sense of wonder. The princesses fit here, adding their own color and tones, lovely, unblemished young things that they are. There is logic in the fact that Castaspella fits here too: shining and beautiful and soft.

She has never been so lonely in her life, if this unnatural, unwanted second chance even qualifies as such. She always had some fire to extinguish in the Fright Zone, some mess to clean. Even as a prisoner she had frequent guests, all begging for her input and assistance. No one needs her here.

Death was easy, quick and painless. She saved the world with it. This agony of being alive, surrounded and unwelcome, is so much worse. Even at her lowest, when mother mocked her bleeding lips, at least she saw her in those moments. She spoke to her, acknowledged her, however cruelly.

She stares at the thing in the mirror for a very long time. When she cannot endure her appraisal a moment longer, she begins to weep in earnest. 

×××

> Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile,
> 
> then you descend into the terror of the next life
> 
> -Louise Glück, “Thrush”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know after the first chapter and what's about to happen in this one it may be hard to believe in a happy ending for Shadow Weaver, but I promise she'll get one. Not for free, and not easily, but she'll get one. 
> 
> Thanks to everyone who left me a comment on Chapter 1! They mean the world to me!

> The god of fire descends
> 
> to light the forest, to fill you
> 
> with what hollows. Everyone you meet
> 
> you scorch.
> 
> -Rajiv Mohabir, "Tattvamasi, You Are That"

×××

Her quarters in the Fright Zone were far from luxurious, a large step down from her bedroom in Mystacor or the so-called prison she now inhabits, but they were better than her first home, its wooden floors dilapidated and dirty. The Fright Zone had what she needed: lotions and potions and oils, her crystals and books and vials, all where she left them, never disturbed by another pair of hands.

Here in Bright Moon she has nothing of her own. Shadow Weaver rarely leaves her room except to visit the library or the greenhouse, or to scavenge for food in the kitchens if she has refused too many meals in a row and grows faint with hunger. Some nights if the earthquakes wake her and her heart beats too loudly in her chest she walks about the grounds, miserable and disquieted, her guards two thunderous shadows behind her. 

Tonight she sits on the edge of her bed and rubs her itching hands, the skin dry and ashy from gardening, debating the efficacy of making her own lotion versus mustering up the humility to ask for something of the princesses. She looks down at the half-healed blisters, canyons on the grey expanse of her flesh, and decides that this asceticism offers her some measure of comfort, of control.

She lets her hands crack and bleed instead.

×××

The lonely old hag is always in Bright Moon. Shadow Weaver watches Castaspella saunter across the grounds, always trailed by a colorful retinue, claiming her visits are for diplomatic purposes despite never actually scheduling meetings.

But the truth is she's lonely and desperate-- Shadow Weaver can read it on her face like an open book-- she misses her brother and niece, and the cadre of wayward princesses that flock to her side. She recalls how Castaspella gazed up at the stone relief of Queen Angella, doused in regret and sorrow, and Shadow Weaver thinks that in her last life she would have used that weakness against her.

But now there's no point. They aren't on opposite sides or the same side or any side at all. They do battle with unkillable earthquakes now, and Shadow Weaver has nothing useful to add to the fight.

Through a tall window she watches Glimmer's remaining family mosey about the courtyard, their collective power unrivaled by anyone but She-Ra herself. They glow like molten glass in a kiln, so bright she feels dimmer in their vicinity, a void that accepts no heat or light, impotent and inconsequential. 

She thinks about the symphony of Castaspella's magic more often than she would like. The memory of her music plagues her.

×××

Shadow Weaver catches Bow in her room one afternoon when she retired from gardening in the heat of the day. Her door was open and the guards eyed each other nervously: obviously they had been warned of his breaking and entering, but she had not.

His back is turned as he sets down a stack of books on her small table, so she asks, "What are you doing?"

Bow jumps with a choked squawk, eyes wide and cringing. A small rush of spiteful joy fills her chest that even powerless she still holds such sway over him. 

"I-- uh, my dads have a library," he stutters. "Aunt Casta said you used to study Etheria's history, and my dads are historians and, uh, they have library. So I brought you some books."

She ignores for now that Castaspella sends the children on errands that involve invading her personal quarters, and eyes the four stacked books. She recognizes two of the dusty hardbacks, academic studies on the First Ones and the sociological impact of their culture on modern Etherians, but the other two tomes she has not read before.

"We have to return them," he adds, "when you're done."

She holds the silence in the room like a rubber band between her fingers, stretching tighter and tighter as Bow shrinks. Shadow Weaver has no magic now, but her subtle arts remain: the zealous thrill of catalyzing emotion. To the boy's credit, he holds her gaze.

"Is that all?"

"Uh." His brown eyes search the room, as if some suspicious part of him remains convinced her constructs will emerge from the shadows to choke the life from his body. He says, "Yes."

"Then get out," she says, and she relishes the way he scampers to obey.

When she is alone she thumbs through the pages, settling on her bed to read, and cannot help the reluctant excitement she feels at the opportunity to learn something new. She suppresses it with hollow fury, rubbing at the speckles of blood forming in the crease of her dry knuckles before they can fall and stain the pages crimson.

She doesn't want anything; she has never wanted anything.

×××

She spoke back to her mother once, after the merchant mangled her lip but before she ran away to Mystacor. She doesn't remember what she said, only that her mother refused to feed her for days. She made her siblings deny her, an easy feat at that point as they had their own survival to ensure, and on the third day she offered her water.

Her mother upturned the simmering pot on her outstretched forearms, careful not to burn her fingers because she needed those to steal, and said, "Look at the mess you made. Clean it up."

And as she lay shaking in silence on the floor-- some pain was so great that it shocked her: a voice unable to scream, a pitiful creature that folds in on itself and ceases to exist-- she remembered the empty faces of her siblings staring down at her, all silent hauteur, and knew for the first time that she would never be safe in her home.

"Do not help her," mother said, though her brother and sister didn't need to be told.

No one would pick her up or carry her away. No one would help clean her messes.

She didn't need to be told that either.

×××

The ground shakes violently, waking her just as a sheet of dust falls into her eyes. In the pink dawn light she sees that the crack on her wall has grown, carving a crooked path to her ceiling. She is no construction expert, but that sort of rapid propagation implies dangerous structural instability. The aftershocks are growing worse.

She lays on her back, staring at her damaged ceiling, her scarred arms limp above the plush comforter. She had been dreaming of her death again, not a nightmare despite the content, merely a recollection.

_"This is only the beginning for you. I am so proud of you, Catra."_

It had been simple enough to say at the time, a rare honest statement. She was impressed that Catra managed to live that long, and all for Adora, no less. Such was Adora's power.

But now in the face of surviving, in the face of _living_ with it, the statement is foolish and sentimental, a fleeting thought better left unsaid. Shadow Weaver has learned many things in her time but never how to live with this vulnerability, defenseless and debilitated, her feelings a guillotine over a bowed head.

She hopes that if she lays here long enough the room will collapse and bury her bones for good.

×××

She wanders at night. Sleep eludes her as it has for years, but insomnia is a familiar problem, something steady to which she can cling. 

The guards posted outside of her bedroom trail behind at a distance. It has been four months since she died, and she is no more trusted in Bright Moon than she was in Mystacor or the Fright Zone or her mother's house. But she doesn't care if they follow; she is sick of twisting in the sheets of her dark room, frustrated and sleepless.

She finds a balcony with a view of the moons and the castle grounds, an easy feat in a castle with a surplus of them, a place to gaze out at nothing in particular. She crosses her arms against the chill night air, her dry skin uncomfortable against the cotton of her nightgown though she is accustomed to the pain of it.

A movement below catches her attention and her face tightens. Catra sits in the courtyard on the stonework fence, her tail flicking the granite as Adora approaches from the castle with two steaming mugs of tea or cocoa or something equally inane. Catra takes one of the mugs and Adora stands between her legs, their faces inches apart. And they kiss, slowly and shamelessly, their drinks forgotten as Catra's fingers rake through blonde hair.

A wave of embarrassment creeps up her body and she staggers back against the stone wall, away from the balcony's edge, anything to avoid drawing attention to herself. Nausea overcomes her and she screws her eyes shut. She feels predatory and disgusting, and wishes she'd never seen them together. She wishes she'd been warned though there is no one here who would bother to tell her.

When they were both babies, orphans of war not even a year old, she would sneak them out of the nursery and into her bed to hold them and talk to them and pet Catra's silky soft baby fur and the lone tuft of white-blonde hair on Adora's head. They could do nothing but coo and cuddle and cry out for her, and she loved the warmth of them, their need for her protection and care, even if her favoritism endangered them all in the eyes of the Horde. They didn't flinch at her face beneath the mask; they loved her lopsided kisses and toothy smiles, and the danger was worth it to hear their gurgling laughter.

Catra and Adora needed her, their pseudo-parent, so she promised them before they knew what it meant that she would do better than her mother ever did. And then, like all things she touches, that promise decayed.

The short hair on the back of her neck rises, not from the unnatural scene below but from someone above. She tilts back her head, green eyes reflecting the moonlight, and sees Castaspella watching her sadly from her high tower balcony, her abundance of pity crashing down like the weight of a waterfall on her shoulders.

There is no mask to hide her shock and revulsion: Castaspella saw her quail. She sneers up at her as fiercely as she can manage, and rushes back to her bedroom so quickly the guards jog to catch up. The silence of her bedroom is deafening, and the cracked ceiling frowns overhead.

Shadow Weaver's hair is shoulder-length before they speak again. 

×××

There were lovers in her past. Only a handful, and always in the dark.

There was a tailor with gentle fingers and long eyelashes, and a wry guard who made her sincerely laugh for the first time in weeks. The flower girl, the awful spellcaster, the lady-in-waiting. 

She used these women for the night, never more than once, and nothing more. No one ever sat her on a stone balustrade, kissing her sweetly in the moonlight until they retired to bed. 

Shadow Weaver digs her nails into the rich soil, carving out a hole for the roots of her hydrangeas. There is no soft moonlight for her now. Only the sun burning her grey skin pink, her ropy white scars like milk-pale vines across her body.

Perhaps she will decay faster in the light of day. 

×××

Entrapta burns her arms badly one afternoon. Hordak, the original Hordak, carries her around the courtyard like a bride or a baby. He shouts for help, his old dictatorial bellowing a familiar sound to her ears, and the guards spin uselessly in circles. The clone, Wrong Hordak, shouts from inside that they can't find the healers: Adora and Glimmer and Micah are all gone and for once Castaspella is doing her job in Mystacor. 

"Bring her here," Shadow Weaver calls from the greenhouse, washing her hands in the small sink.

She is surprised when Hordak obeys, his teeth bared like a feral beast. The purple haired girl weeps quietly against his chest, holding up her reddened forearms, blisters already beginning to form. Wrong Hordak cries too, his lower lip quivering pathetically. 

_Stop crying. It's not the worst burn,_ Shadow Weaver thinks, but does not say. 

She snaps the leaves from her aloe vera plant, hearty and hale, the clear gel oozing onto her fingertips, and points. "Set her on the bench," she wearily sighs, because Hordak is still stupidly standing in the middle of the greenhouse with Entrapta shaking in his arms.

"Go get bandages." Wrong Hordak takes off at a sprint, suddenly rejuvenated now that he has a clear mission. 

"I am going to put this aloe on your burns," she says. She isn't certain why she announces her intent-- this is the only possible outcome of the whole ordeal-- but she waits for Entrapta to nod anyway.

"I was trying to get around Emily's coolant heat exchanger and it shifted," she whines, "and achhh."

Shadow Weaver smears the gel onto her arms as gently as possible, though it would probably feel better if it had been chilled first.

Suddenly, Shadow Weaver feels Entrapta's lavender hair wrap around her shoulders and she freezes, rigid and panicked, at her touch. But Entrapta stares at her fingers, oblivious to the movement of her hair, like a baby reaching for its mother, a primitive, mindless gesture. Shadow Weaver relaxes, refocusing on her task, and ignores the contact in the name of keeping her distracted. She is far easier to manage in the rare moments when she's still, an infant with a shiny toy in her hands.

"What upgrades were you installing?"

"Ahhhh, I overclocked her frontside bus!" she exhales, tears leaking from her bright red eyes. "Her motherboard wasn't fast enough to process the holo shield and demolition protocol simultaneously, so I adjusted the clock ratio and jumpered out her terminal and now she can do it!"

"Hmm."

"But her heat sink wasn't dispersing the new load evenly so I was, ahhh," she fidgets uncomfortably, "going to re-route her heat exchanger and I burned-"

"Tell me about Emily's demolition protocol."

Shadow Weaver feels Hordak's eyes on the back of her skull as Entrapta blathers on about lasers and momentum shields, but she ignores him too. The aloe vera soothes her own hands, still dry and cracking, but if Entrapta notices the roughness of them she gives no indication. There is one thing she can say about the princess of Dryl: she is the only one who appears genuinely unbothered by Shadow Weaver's macabre appearance.

Wrong Hordak bursts through the greenhouse door, slamming it so vigorously that one of her gold dust dracaena pots crashes to the ground and shatters. Entrapta jumps, her prehensile hair constricting around Shadow Weaver's waist. She scowls as he apologizes, fumbling with the heap of bandages coiled around his arms.

"Leave it," she orders him like a dog. "Come here." He stumbles toward them sheepishly, and Shadow Weaver takes two bandage rolls of the two dozen he somehow managed to acquire from the castle, meticulously wrapping Entrapta's arms with them.

"Tell me about Emily's holo shield," she says when Entrapta flinches. Outside of the application of First One's technology, she has no interest in mechanics or computers or the rolling robot called Emily. But Entrapta's hair moves again in spite of the pain she must be in, squeezing here and tapping there, emphatically gesturing as she speaks.

When she's finished with the bandages she rises to her feet and says, "That will hold you over until the healers return."

Hordak stands rigidly with his snow-haired brother pressing to his side as well as he can with an armful of bandages. Somehow Glimmer and the princesses have decided to keep them, to let them _integrate_ into life at the castle, as if Hordak is not solely responsible for the countless deaths of their citizens, for the remorseless brutality he inflicted against them their entire lives.

Entrapta's hair squeezes Shadow Weaver's twiggy arms in some approximation of a hug. It has been months since someone touched her, not since Castaspella in the hallway, and she finds herself surprised not to recoil. But there is no control, no dominance in anything Entrapta does; she is a simple thing with simple needs and her hair moves of its own volition. She shuffles over to Hordak, who gently wraps an arm around her shoulders, his face still sneering mistrust. While Shadow Weaver has a litany of issues over her history with Hordak, she cannot fault him for his countenance; she looks at herself in the mirror with same expression.

"Thank you," Entrapta says in her nasally voice, tears dried on her cheeks. And she smiles, proud that she's remembered her manners.

"You're welcome," she flatly replies.

She washes her hands again, ignoring the sting of the water as the protective coating of aloe slides away from her skin, and sets about to replant her gold dust dracaena.

×××

One rainy afternoon she leaves her room and there are no guards to follow her. She tugs nervously at the sleeves of her black turtleneck sweater, warily glancing up and down the hallway.

Perhaps the guards have been repurposed for repair work after the last earthquake, or Glimmer has decided to let her roam again, the foolish girl-queen that she is.

Even inside the castle the air is humid and heavy around her, far too uncomfortable to work in the damp greenhouse. Sweat burns her dry skin, the salty sting like the kiss of her self-destruction, a soft echo of the inferno she could once unleash at will.

All of her delivered books have been read-- Bow will come with more tomorrow-- and she has nothing to occupy her mind. Her feet carry her to the east wing of the castle, an area she rarely travels since the night she saw Adora and Catra together, where most of the guest rooms and studies are located.

She passes two guards in the halls and though she scowls at them, they do not stop or question her.

_Glimmer's orders then_ , she thinks.

The Bright Moon library is large and full of the sort of fiction she patently disdains: fantastical stories about heroes and love and other untruths that will only lead to disappointment. She suspects this collection was Angella's doing, though her daughter now curates it just as fondly. She tours the library, her fingers dragging along the spines of the books, peeking around the bookshelves for any sign of life. The space is empty but for her, even all the side rooms with lounge chairs and tables for meetings.

But the door to the farthest room is partially closed, cracked just enough for a band of light to sneak out and for her to peek in. It looks like it's been struck by a whirlwind: notebooks and textbooks scattered across the wide mahogany table, littered with crumbled paper with discarded sketches of geometric shapes, dulled pencils and an abandoned drawing compass. It resembles the study rooms of Mystacor before finals week, swarmed with frenzied students cramming for exams in a last-ditch effort to pass.

And there on the edge of the table rests the golden halo of the Head Sorceress. Shadow Weaver pulls back at once, inhaling sharply.

But she hears no noise inside, no shuffling of paper or scratching of pens. She slowly pushes the door, mercifully quiet on its hinges, revealing the form of a sleeping woman. Castaspella sinks into an armchair, her legs curled beneath her, head lolling on one shoulder. Her index finger keeps her place in the book she read, now resting forgotten in her lap. The lamp over her head shines down on her black hair and creates a new halo, casting long shadows on the already-prominent dark circles beneath her eyes.

The crack of thunder peals outside and Shadow Weaver clenches her jaw, but Castaspella doesn't wake or even stir. The woman sleeps like the dead.

Green eyes return to the messy table, its childish sloppiness an affront to her senses. She cannot help herself.

She slips past the door and begins to collect the papers and books into tidy piles, aligning the pencils into neat rows. The diagrams are spells she realizes, her interest piqued. Incomplete spell circles for binding and strengthening and stability, likely for large-scale structural applications. It would take a tremendous amount of power to cast one of these alone, unfinished as they are, and she scowls at their inefficiency. There is surplus in their framework, no anchors to make them last, bloated and amateurish despite the skill it would take to create such a spell from scratch at all. The spells-- no, one spell, but many versions of it-- are creative but unpolished.

She takes a pencil and a fresh paper and refines the outline of the most passable draft, distilling it to something more feasible. While her magic is gone, her logic and arcane education are not, and the work is enjoyable. Time passes while she sketches, and Castaspella shifts only once to curl into a tighter ball on her chair. When Shadow Weaver is finished, she sets her revision on the top of the pile of papers, appraising the clean lines one last time.

_It could use a proofing_ , she idly thinks, but that would take hours, and she has spent long enough in the study room.

She glances to Castaspella from her seat at the table. She is peaceful and young all curled in her chair, her book fallen in the hollow of her body, its marked page lost. Her rest is a true collapse: the bone-weary blackout of a woman who has pushed herself too hard, the weight of her responsibilities crushing and ceaseless. She considers that this may be why Castaspella prefers Bright Moon to Mystacor; here she can work and rest, alone and on her own terms.

Shadow Weaver purses her mangled lips. She knows firsthand that Castaspella doesn't sleep at night either. She rises noiselessly, careful not to disturb her, and turns off the lamp above her head. The overcast light from the window paints her smooth face with a stormy grey-blue overlay, more delicate and restful than the electric lighting.

_She is more tolerable when she's asleep_ , Shadow Weaver thinks, standing over her.

She closes the door behind her, suppressing the tightness in her chest, and refuses to question the solace of her thoughts when she looked at Castaspella and felt useful again.

×××

The cellar in the basement of Bright Moon's castle is rustic, woody, and warm, out-of-place with the rest of its ivory grounds. There are four brown leather chairs, a table, a darkwood bar, and hundreds of wine bottles in tidy racks. She suspects the back portion of the room is refrigerated for whites and rosés, though she has zero interest in exploring those vintages.

She found the room by accident, strolling through corridors she'd never explored before, even during her first imprisonment. The rain hasn't let up for nearly a week, her guards have permanently relinquished their posts, and she dares not return to the library without absolute certainty that Castaspella has vacated the study room.

Her red skirt brushes against her ankles as she steps around the cellar door, and she stops suddenly with a frown. Micah stands before her in an informal blue tunic, casually perusing the bottle racks with a practiced eye. He turns to her with a confused expression that softens at once, his blatant pity as obvious and infuriating as his sister's. He looks tired.

"Just in time to join me," Micah says, pulling a second glass from the shelf. "I was in the mood for a Plumerian red, if that suits you. And as I recall, it does."

Shadow Weaver chews the inside of her mouth before stilling her face. Twisting her lips into anything but neutrality magnifies the discoloration of her scars. She says nothing, but sits rigidly in one of the chairs and crosses her legs.

She takes the glass from Micah as he pours generously. The cracked webbing of her thumb and index finger bleeds lightly, burgundy against her grey skin, but he doesn't notice and sits quietly across the table from her.

He watches her with soft brown eyes, as playful and curious as ever, the same invasive, perceptive look he shares with his daughter and sister. Though where Shadow Weaver cannot help but feel a twinge of fondness for Micah and Glimmer, Castaspella makes her uncomfortable.

She drinks deeply, the rush of wine on her tongue an immediate relief. It's been months since she's tasted the subtle sweetness of plum and cherry or the tannin of clove, and she swallows, eyes closed, savoring the flavor.

"I come down here from time to time when things are," Micah taps the side of his glass, "stressful. We've been rebuilding. Trying to manage the earthquakes. It's more of a struggle in Mystacor because of its location."

She says nothing, not particularly interested in Etheria's lithosphere or shifting tectonic plates or geology in general, but that's never stopped Micah from talking before. He could carry a conversation with a brick wall. 

"You don't have to hide in your room, you know," Micah catches her eye, abruptly changing the subject. "You're not a prisoner; you're a guest."

She wishes he would look anywhere but her face when he speaks. She drawls, "Do all of your guests have guards assigned to them?"

Micah smiles again as if he anticipated the question, and her annoyance grows. "That was for your own protection, and you know it."

She bristles both at the implication of her powerlessness and at his tacit dismissal that they mistrusted her in the first place. Denial doesn't suit him.

"Well the guards are gone now, so you have either decided that the threat to my well-being is over or you have signed my death warrant. How charitable of the royal family."

"You're safe here," he gently counters.

Her scarred lip curls against her will. "Perhaps you should inform your sister. It's difficult to feel safe when being thrown across a room and choked to unconsciousness."

His smile flattens, "We have spoken about that. She should not have hurt you, just as you should not have touched Catra, and you know it. If you gave Castaspella a chance I think you two have a lot in common-"

"Enough," she snaps. "I'm nothing like her." She drains her glass, glaring intently at the bar as she wipes away the smudge of blood she left around the stem. Castaspella is her antonym: excessive and loud and animated, sought after for her advice and company. Shadow Weaver is the absence of these things: a lack, avoided, unloved.

"So you say," Micah furrows his brow. "But you aren't showing anyone what you _are_ like now. You hardly speak. Even I don't know you anymore."

"Forgive me for not keeping you abreast of my personality changes, but you were presumed dead for twelve years and I actually _died_."

He rises quickly and she flinches, furious with herself for wincing at a harmless movement-- only to pour more wine, not to hurt her, not to strike-- from _Micah_ of all people. She grinds her teeth, and knows that he's making a grand show of ignoring her reaction. They sit in tense silence, the pressure of it building behind her eyes like the puncturing threat of a migraine.

"Shadow Weaver." He always hesitates before saying her name, as if _Light Spinner_ sits on his lips like a curse, and her face tightens in agitation.

"What is it?" she bites out.

"Why did you flee Mystacor? After our spell?"

She barks an incredulous laugh. "Use your brain, Micah. Why do you think?"

"You left me," he says quietly.

She remembers flashes from the aftermath of the Spell of Obtainment: Micah's wide-eyed terror, the sensation of drowning and being swallowed whole by something cold and ancient. She remembers the crackling across her skin like the burn of dry ice, shriveling and freezing her: her first death by frost and darkness, lost in the vacuum of space. She remembers the Dark Magic craving more, an open maw she couldn't control no matter how she struggled against its power. The magical parasite ate Light Spinner alive.

"I disobeyed direct orders from the Council. I _killed_ Norwyn," she hisses.

"That wasn't you. That-"

"Do not excuse it. The magic was inside of me when it killed him. It's part of me-" she stops herself with a sneer. "It _was_ part of me. The Council would never forgive that."

"You never gave them the chance by running away."

She thinks of her mother's house, and how there was no room for explanations, only results, only more punishment for wasting her time with words. She hoarsely whispers, "You are more naive than I thought if you truly believe they would have forgiven me. They mistrusted me long before that."

"Because you don't explain things, or refuse to hear any arguments contrary to your own," he says calmly. "And then you run away."

"Yes, well," she says, taking the glass and the rest of the bottle. "Why break with tradition now?"

She ignores his sighing protest and stalks out of the cellar without a passing glance, red hot embarrassment boiling in her gut.

×××

There is an axiom that she taught Micah in Mystacor, different but not dissimilar to the algebraic ones she could still recite by heart, and she hopes he could too, else she'd truly failed him as a teacher.

Whatever is, is.

When he was young he liked this Law of Identity for its simplicity, though he clearly did not grasp the depth of the phrase, parroting it back to her without taking a breath to consider its power, how to spot the illogical fallacy of equivocation, when to know that A was A, not B.

She sits alone in her room now, uncomfortably drunk, just like the first time in Mystacor when she was 17 and too afraid to drink with her classmates, lest she embarrass herself.

She doesn't crave magic like she used to, riding the coattails of more powerful people who could foist her up on their shoulders and keep her above the rising tide. She is protected here in Bright Moon, locked in a cage, a coffin, where corpses belong. She doesn't have a goal or a purpose or anything that ties her to the being called Shadow Weaver. None of her magic, not even her body. This new form burned away the old, reconstructed it fresh as the soil in her mouth when she first woke. She is a new key in an old lock, unable to reopen the door without shattering the brittle, rusted metal around her.

She is a woman with three names and four lives, a negative of a negative of a negative.

She drains her glass, the last of the wine bottle, and thinks, _Micah never learned, and how could he?_

Whatever is, is.

And she is not.

×××

Her conversations with the others are brief and rare, as fleeting as the hummingbirds in the gardens. She feels tense around them, but loathes the niggling thought that she would rather feel unwelcome than alone.

Perfuma speaks to her in generic pleasantries, small talk about her greenhouse that drives Shadow Weaver insane. She has learned that if she says nothing at all in reply, the girl will eventually float away, jabbering about her new meditation regime.

Scorpia and Glimmer bring her clothes, usually ugly and bright, and she complains in a clipped tone until they leave her room. 

Bow faithfully delivers her books, astonished by the rate at which she reads. She doesn't rebuke his flattery.

Mermista and the small one, Frosta, glare at her and never speak.

Adora watches her solemnly, trying to unravel a mystery she fundamentally does not understand, but complexities were never her strength. She said once, _"I will never forgive you. You ruin people. You ruin any chance they could ever be happy."_ And Shadow Weaver tries not to think about how often those words float through her mind.

"Do you need something, Adora?" she asks, and she hates her voice's betrayal, the tenderness of it, the soft, underlying thread of affection. She is not like Castaspella; she does not dote.

"No," says Adora softly. "I don't." And then she is gone.

Most days she never sees Catra or Castaspella at all, and she thinks that is for the best. 

×××

For the first time, someone knocks at her bedroom door: three beats in rapid succession, firm and intentional. Shadow Weaver closes her book, rising from the warm spot in her bed with a frown. She is never interrupted at night and is already dressed in her long black pajamas.

She slips into a robe before she opens the door, and barely contains her look of surprise when she comes face to face with Castaspella, her obstinate jaw already set as if she expects a fight. She wears her full court robes, halo included, and wears a satchel slung over one shoulder.

"You finished my spell," Castaspella says instead of a greeting, and the words are somehow more accusatory than grateful.

Shadow Weaver gazes down at her as imperiously as she can in her pajamas, one eyebrow raised. There's no point in denying her work: no one else in Bright Moon could modify a spell circle as elegantly as she could, not even Micah with all of his vast power. His handwriting is chicken scratch besides.

"I'd hardly call it finished," she replies.

She feels her pulse thrumming in her ears, distracting and loud, waiting for her late night caller to speak again. Castaspella's eyes shamelessly search her ravaged face with that same steel-sharp quality she shares with her brother and niece, as if she watches some piteous, exotic animal pacing in a cage. Shadow Weaver does not shift or fidget beneath her scrutiny. She refuses to give her the pleasure of revealing her discomfort.

"Be that as it may, I would like to speak to you."

"What about?"

"Several things," Castaspella swallows and glances down the hallway. "May I come in?"

Shadow Weaver says nothing about the late hour, she knows neither of them sleep, but glides away from the doorframe with pursed lips. She folds her arms across her chest, looming near her bedside table, and hears Castaspella slip inside behind her and close the door. She can smell her bright perfume wafting through the bedroom, overpowering mint and geranium, and Castaspella takes a seat in one of her reading chairs without being offered, pulling her satchel into her lap. Her rich brown eyes take in the room, lingering on the crack in the ceiling.

She is a petite woman, and could curl into this high-backed chair as easily as she did the one in the library. Shadow Weaver scowls the thought away, suppressing it along with the fear that she might bring up the topic of Catra and Adora.

"What do you want?"

"I would like your assistance with my spell," Castaspella says flatly, the words rushing out of her in a self-conscious stream. "The earthquakes are getting worse, here and in Mystacor, and my sorcerers have yet to develop a permanent stability spell. What they've made won't last, and the buildings are-" she sucks her lips into her mouth. "We're tempting fate."

Shadow Weaver feels a rush of pride in her superiority. Castaspella has openly admitted that even powerless she is better than the best of her mages.

"You have a whole city of sorcerers who cannot anchor a permanent stability spell?" Shadow Weaver smiles, for once not caring how gruesome her cleft lip appears. "How Mystacor has fallen."

She notes how Castaspella's face darkens but she swallows her pride-- she must be very desperate indeed-- and tersely nods. "You know how much energy it takes to anchor a permanent spell. The prototypes aren't holding. Your edits to my draft are the most comprehensive I've seen so far. I ask that you continue to edit the spells I bring you."

"No," says Shadow Weaver simply. She sits on the edge of her bed, eyes narrowed, a small smirk on her lips, and does not elaborate.

Castaspella sucks in a tight breath, her cheeks flushed angrily. But instead of speaking, she rummages through her satchel and removes a piece of parchment, Shadow Weaver's spell revision, and approaches her slowly. She slides it beneath the lamplight on the bedside table and there, in the yellow electric light, Shadow Weaver sees the unintentional mark she left behind: a thin smear of blood from her hands, from the cracked skin of her wrist, on the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

Her smile draws into a sneer, furious with her own inattention. She should never have entered that study room.

"What do I need to do in exchange for your help?"

"Apologize."

The muscle of Castaspella's cheek tightens, as if this is not the bartering she anticipated, but she says, "I'm sorry for hurting you, but-"

"No," snaps Shadow Weaver. "There will be no qualifiers. Apologize properly, or you will get nothing from me."

Castaspella breathes heavily, her nostrils flared in agitation, lips parted as if she wants to bare her teeth. But she swallows it down and trains her eyes on Shadow Weaver's, blinking hard and furious, unwilling to shift another inch backwards in this abrupt, miserable power struggle.

Then her face softens, gaze fixed sadly on the floor, and Castaspella kneels before her. Shadow Weaver feels the flood of her capitulation low in her stomach, the blasphemous sight of the High Sorceress on her knees a shock to both their systems.

She quietly says, "I am sorry for hurting you. Please forgive me for what I've done."

Her voice is sincere and low, but it isn't enough, not when Shadow Weaver has finally wrestled back a modicum of power, not when she has the high ground and the pit of her stomach opens wide in hunger, dissatisfied. 

"Beg," she murmurs, her hands clasped in her lap. "Beg for my help."

Castaspella inhales once, slowly, her face deadened to all emotion, before she splays her fingertips wide on the floor. She bows down in prostration, and the High Sorceress' halo clinks against the polished marble tiles, the ultimate surrender of a woman desperate to protect her people. She pays the cost of her own dignity, her savior complex overpowering her humiliation.

"Please," she whispers, her lips brushing the ground. "Help me."

A rush of sordid, spiteful joy permeates her flesh, buzzing with delight at Castaspella's feebleness, at the most powerful sorceress in Mystacor bowing to a magicless Shadow Weaver, imploring for her help. But her perverse pleasure deteriorates as she stares down the long line of Castaspella's back, her robes spread around her as if she drowns in a pond. Then the ugliness of it surfaces fully, bubbling up from below, from a dark place in her heart where she knows how it feels to be subjugated.

"Get up," she hisses. "You're embarrassing yourself."

Castaspella sits up slowly, her eyes hooded and stoic, and says after a long moment, "Entrapta told me what you did for her."

"The girl's an idiot and Hordak's no better. They would have stood there for hours screaming for a healer."

"You helped her." Still on her knees, Castaspella digs through her satchel again and removes a smooth, rectangular bottle. She slides closer to Shadow Weaver, holds out her hands, and says, "You're bleeding. I know you're bleeding. I can help you."

"What do you think this is?" she exhales, her voice reedier than she intends. "Some kind of recompense?"

"An apology without action is meaningless," Castaspella firmly retorts, a glimpse of her backbone strengthening her voice. "You can help me, and I can help you," she repeats, "if you give me your hands."

She pours the lotion into her smooth palms, creamy and eggshell white, warming it. Shadow Weaver truly cannot tell if this is another way to wound her, to torture her and take away her power, some psychological battle she's woefully unprepared to fight. She thinks that Castaspella with all her gentleness could bore a hole into her belly with her subtle, demure expression still trained on the floor, and Shadow Weaver wouldn't know until it was too late that the seeds of something poisonous bloomed inside her.

"Please," says Castaspella. "Give me your hands."

"Stop begging," Shadow Weaver mutters. She inches her hands forward between Castaspella's outreached ones, just to shut her up, and her shoulders immediately tense when she's touched. She turns her face away petulantly. If she could survive Entrapta touching her then she could do this too.

Castaspella gently works the lotion into the space between her dry knuckles, deliberate and meticulous, rubbing the pad of her thumbs against the muscles on either side of her life line, long ago severed and scarred by Dark Magic. Her body feels pulled in half: the weaker part of her wants to enjoy the contact, the release of her tension, the relief of a salve on her cracking skin, but the stronger part retains her paranoia. She knows this is a ploy, a feint, the psychological diversion of relinquishing dominance to obtain it. She doesn't trust good feelings any more than the sensation of falling: the thrill of euphoric weightlessness before crashing back to earth.

"You need to take care of your skin." Castaspella says softly. She is not at all like Entrapta; she notices and judges and comments. "You should know that I am trying to help you as much as you can help me."

Shadow Weaver flinches at her words, but does not pull her hands away. "I don't need help, and your savior complex is unbecoming."

Castaspella works her fingers one by one, her smooth forehead furrows unhappily. "Everyone needs help from time to time. There's no shame in it. I thought you might recognize that after everything you've done-"

"After everything I've done?" Shadow Weaver asks, her voice raising. "Now I am both your obligation and the object of your perpetual criticism?"

"That's not-"

"You presume to know me-" She yanks free her cracked, bloody hands, hunched like a cornered beast on her bed.

"Let me finish-" Castaspella snaps, and Shadow Weaver cannot tell if she means her words or her handiwork, but she offers her no time for either. She reaches for magic that isn't there, the only explosive hatred she can summon is her words, vicious and honed by violent necessity to a razor's edge.

"Everything I did was to ensure my survival and the survival of the children in my care," she spits, leaning forward into Castaspella's face, her own hideous visage enough to make her lean away. Her heart pounds and she clings to what she knows: she can still control a space, she can still control a conversation. The fear she exudes is a different form now, ugly and monstrous and intimidating where she once used sly secrecy and manipulation.

"Your survival didn't depend on abusing those-"

"Do not speak to _me_ of abuse!" she screams, fangs bared. Her chest rises and falls, eyes wide, and Castaspella's mouth slips open as if she's sucked the air from her lungs. 

When she processes her words the acid and glass of them erupt in her chest, and all she sees is her own horror reflected in the woman kneeling beneath her. Shadow Weaver flees her bedroom without another word, her oily hands clutched to stomach. She hides in the greenhouse, far from prying eyes where she can sort through her agony alone, and when she returns to her room hours later Castaspella is gone.

The bottle of lotion sits untouched on her nightstand, ridiculing her.

×××

> Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
> 
> the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
> 
> from the speeding passage of time
> 
> -Ada Limón, "The Leash"


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like this will be a 5 part story! Enjoy the fact that healing can be slow, and sometimes really hurts. <3

> O body,
> 
> always healing despite me. O body, twin spy
> 
> tasked against my plot to rush the dying,
> 
> guardian of the next world’s sweets, yes,
> 
> I’ll lick this salt.
> 
> -Kemi Alabi, "A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes"

×××

The garden keeps her busy, pruning and potting and replacing glass windows when they shatter. She has stabilized most of her ferns with rope and wooden posts, anything to protect them from the inevitable earthquakes. Her herb garden fairs well, though the thyme isn't thriving, and the sole cactus she keeps in the corner nearby grows pricklier by the day. She is less accustomed to growing food and more familiar with flowers, but she found vegetable seeds scattered in the pantry and cleared the dead plots to make room for the tomatoes, zucchini, and okra, whatever she could grow. The challenge keeps her occupied, gratifying in its mundane way.

Shadow Weaver has visitors in the garden on occasion, though they are few and far between, and they rarely spend long in her presence, which suits her preferences well. Perfuma at least comes bearing gifts, along with Scorpia, who gushes over the product of her labors with annoying, theatrical positivity. Last week they came with a jam jar full of strange seeds for her, sweet bell peppers of many colors, Perfuma said, and she intends to plant them tomorrow now that she has space in the vegetable garden.

Shadow Weaver wipes her hands on her work apron as she makes a final appraisal of the day's work, setting down her jar of seeds. The sun sets behind her, pink and orange, reflecting off the Moonstone in the distance. A small movement at her feet catches her eye: a snail, small and brown, glides beneath the leaves of her summer squash. It slides along without a care in the world, leaving faint slime trails in the soil as it explores, as if leaving her notes in the sigils of the First Ones.

She's never had a pet before. Mother wouldn't allow it; they couldn't afford another mouth to feed. Before she was called Shadow Weaver she found a striped garter snake in the trash pile behind their house, small and friendly, comfortable with being handled by a child. Her mother beheaded it with a kitchen knife the moment she brought it inside. She remembers how it twitched and bled, its severed body flailing against her bare feet, and how her mother called it useless and made her clean up the mess. 

But a snail is miniscule, unimportant, and unobtrusive. It would be happy in her garden, and she doesn't mind its presence. The greenhouse would be safer than the woods outside the city, temperate and free of predators, though little would protect him from the earthquakes.

She wonders, if she still had her magic, would she feel the earthquakes before they occurred, the tectonic plates groaning and shifting, unnatural magic tearing even the atmosphere apart? The detached portions of the earth, even those that float in the clouds over the planet, fare no better: Mystacor quakes and rumbles with the aftershocks of Horde Prime's attack on the Heart of Etheria. But Shadow Weaver's skin doesn't prickle with ice-cold premonitions like Adora's and Glimmer's. She must wait until the ground speaks of its displeasure, and feel its agony directly.

The cottage of the Cardinal family is meager, better than the ramshackle hut she was raised in, but not designed to withstand the tremors that rack the kingdom. She hopes their hunter father has the foresight to reinforce his home, or that the mother with her threadbare dresses has the sense to evacuate before they lose everything, what little they have left. She hopes the beady-eyed children know to hide beneath the sturdy kitchen table.

_They are probably already dead_ , she thinks, recalling how they found her catatonic, and fed her and let her sleep beneath their roof, and how they never asked her questions. _They have no sense at all._

Green eyes lower to the snail, his mottled shell a fine camouflage among the leaves. She cannot protect him from broken glass if the windowpanes shatter again, but the potted plants on the shelves above the herb garden can be relocated. She spends half an hour rearranging them before she's satisfied that nothing will fall and crush the ignorant creature below, then she leaves the snail safely in the dark.

×××

She spends every day alone, and wanders the forest when there is nothing left to do in her garden. The library is too occupied now, full of Castaspella and her sorcerer cohorts working at all hours of the night on spells that will ultimately fail them. The courtyard is too busy, as are the training grounds, where Catra and her massive beast lurk with the other princesses. She dares not waste her time in the shop with Entrapta and Hordak, though Wrong Hordak, now _Gertrude_ — he changes his name daily, trying to find something that suits him, though he has no concept of how standard Etherian naming schemes work— has bothered her about visiting them on more than one occasion. 

Beneath her feet the grass grows soft and mossy, the backdrop for a ring of wild, pale mushrooms, edible and welcoming. "Ah," she says, her voice hoarse from disuse. She stoops low to harvest them, slicing the stems of those with opened caps and clean gills, her thumb brushing against their edges, and gently places them into her basket.

Deep in the woods she is alone, a hostage only to herself, thankful her feet carry her away from the others. Her sweat stings her dry skin, though she has made an effort to use the lotion on her nightstand. She would not let Castaspella win, and how better to prove her victory than to eradicate her own weakness? She would never leave her blood behind again, the trail of a dying animal.

She never asked to be tracked; she never asked them to look for her.

×××

It grows dark when she is still deep in the woods, near the ruins of the First Ones, and the blanket of stars reminds her of the way she used to hide in tree roots at night. She never feared the darkness around her, mysterious and cool, quiet and heavy like an all-engrossing sleep. She still relishes the tree sap scent, the brisk breeze that flutters the hair barely brushing her shoulders.

Her head raises from the gnarled roots beside her basket, little purple crystals dotting the ground beneath the tree. First she catches the smoky smell of a fresh fire, then spots the wispy grey line trailing up to the clouds. She slinks toward it— slowly, quietly, too curious to resist— until she hears laughing voices ahead of her, and sees a quaint, candle-lit cottage in a clearing. A short old woman with wild hair and thick eyeglasses putters about, flour dusting her wrinkled hands, excitedly chattering about something Shadow Weaver can't make out. A clay oven glows orange behind her.

And then she sees them, side-by-side, smiling and working at a table. Catra kneads dough enthusiastically, her tail brushing against Adora's calf as she dices fruit.

Shadow Weaver blinks hard, as she did months ago behind her mask in the Fright Zone, watching them cavort in the hallways, shoving each other and giggling after training, as she catalogued their interactions for future use and leverage. But this she cannot use, not now, in her prison where they all know of their relationship and their commitment to each other. She has no reason to separate them or prey on their weaknesses, eradicating them for their own survival. Her heart pounds. They were a liability to her and each other then, to the mission that no longer exists. 

They look happier than she has ever seen them, happier than she has ever given them, and her own futility aches like a broken bone, set and healed incorrectly. She cannot protect them or hurt them or exist with them, as much an outsider as she has ever been—her mother's home, Mystacor, the Fright Zone, Bright Moon— untethered and unbelonging. 

The old woman guides Catra's hands as she rolls out the dough, and she allows the contact, blue and yellow eyes completely focused on her task. She nods, repeating the motion on her own, and they clap her on the back with pride like friends, like family. She shivers with impotent envy at all the things she will never have: lost and young and empty again, peering through the school's windows trying to learn something that no one will teach her.

She cannot stay; she doesn't belong here either. Shadow Weaver treks back to the castle, her body numb from tip to toe.

×××

She uses the lotion on her nightstand out of spite and spite alone.

Visions of Castaspella on her knees swim behind her eyes, and she stamps them out, clenching her jaw. Her hands absorb the moisture immediately, rain on barren soil, but she is committed to taking better care of her skin. She can garden for longer stretches if it doesn't hurt, spend more time distracted from her predicament. Why she bothers with the greenhouse at all she cannot discern. There are far more prolific farmers providing a steady supply of food, even on the cracked ground and crumbling desert canyons. But she can, so she does.

She misses her arcane experimentation, the thrill of many magics coursing through her body: the yawning dark, the electric current of the Black Garnet, her own needling, light precision. She has only a shade of her original power, only her knowledge of the theory behind the application, the mathematical proofs and spellwork sketches, a different sort of satisfaction that sets her mind at ease. She smooths the lotion onto the grey skin of her palms, considering that she will not create any theorems or formulas anytime soon either, not with Castaspella perpetually haunting the castle library.

A sweeping sounds breaks the silence in the room as a plain white letter slides beneath her door. The cover is addressed to her in a crude chicken scratch that she recognizes as Micah's at once, and this is undoubtedly another invitation to join him in the cellar for a glass of wine, the third request in as many weeks. She glides to the door, stooping for the envelope, the moisture on her hands seeping into the paper.

She rolls her eyes as she reads his purple prose, intentionally long-winded to annoy her, before throwing it into her trash bin. He's angling for something, as usual, persistent as he ever was, even in the early days of his youth. Probably assistance for his sister, who almost certainly told him about their sordid conversation. Her arms cross self-consciously. As much as she would love a glass of wine and a good conversation, she doesn't have the capacity for the topics Micah will want to discuss in exchange.

She should have never fixed Castaspella's notes, as abysmal as they were. The intervention was a kindness, and that always leaves her at a deficit. Once, it left her dead. But she recalls the dark circles beneath her eyes and the way she curled around herself so protectively in the chair, breathing deeply in the rainstorm. She thinks perhaps they both have cracked facades.

Shadow Weaver ignores the note, settling down instead with a book she's already read. 

×××

The flash of red and white vanishing between the plants tells her before she enters the greenhouse that Scorpia is loitering inside. She sighs under her breath. It's not uncommon for her to visit, though normally she stands in Perfuma's shadow, preferring to let her partner do the bulk of the talking. Today she is alone in a red sundress, dainty and feminine, her long eyelashes pointed down toward the herb garden at her sandaled feet. Her tail prods mindlessly at a philodendrum leaf, seemingly of its own accord.

"Scorpia," she greets her without enthusiasm.

"Oh, hey! Fancy seeing you here," her wide grin falls away when Shadow Weaver stares blankly in response, her work apron folded over one arm. "So I saw your snail the other day! Pretty cool little guy. Does he have a name?"

"No," Shadow Weaver drawls. Scorpia awkwardly angles one claw behind her back, hiding something. "What do you have?"

She shifts her weight awkwardly. "Uh, well I thought your little buddy there might need a bigger home some day, so I went looking around the woods and found a shell for him. And guess what! It's red!" Between her pincers she flourishes a rounded shell, the color more pinkish-brown than red, and Shadow Weaver stares incredulously. Scorpia blithely continues, "Because we both like red!"

The stupidity of the situation, she finds, bubbles up a laugh in her throat, not mirthless or spiteful for once, but a genuine amusement that she chokes down with a cough. She says, "He is a _snail_. Not a hermit crab."

"But if he goes back to being a slug and outgrows his shell?"

Shadow Weaver squints. Some part of her mind wants to say something reductive and dismissive, but instead she takes a breath, her thin eyebrows knit together, and she says in the matter-of-factly voice she used to teach her students in Mystacor, "Slugs and snails are different creatures. Slugs never have a shell, and snails always grow a shell. They cannot be separated from their shells any more than a turtle could."

Scorpia stands in frozen mystification. She glances down at the snail, who oozes happily through the damp soil, then asks, "Turtles can't come out of their shells?"

"No," says Shadow Weaver, looping her apron around her neck. "They grow with the rest of their bodies. It would be like you detaching your claws."

"Those are my hands!" she gapes.

"Correct."

"Wow," she clears her throat, her white hair bouncing as she nods. "I'll just, yeah, I'll just put this back. I feel pretty, uh, dumb." Scorpia's broad shoulders sink, her lips pulled into a embarrassed frown.

Shadow Weaver considers that Scorpia still visits when the others fear her; she can at least look her in the eye without flinching or judgment. She has seen enough death and mangled corpses to not care about the blisters and burns, or the snarl of her cleft lip. She knows the lies that the Horde and Shadow Weaver told her, the omissions and untruths about her family, her long-dead mothers, but somehow holds no grudge. It has always struck Shadow Weaver as strange that the Princess whose kingdom was desecrated into a military base for her mortal enemies, who wields the power of the deadliest gemstone, whose whole body is a weapon, is the gentlest of them all.

"Leave the shell. It will be," she pauses as she ties her apron around her waist, "decorative."

"Really?"

"Yes. Set it down."

Scorpia talks to herself as she debates the perfect location for the sandy pink shell, repeatedly picking it up and putting it down at various locations in the herb garden. Eventually she rises, satisfied with the placement, and the snail finds his way over, sliming halfway up the side, his eye stalks roaming curiously, before moving on to a patch of dill.

"Yeah, look at that," says Scorpia wistfully. "A shell garden for Little Buddy."

They watch him explore the garden, Scorpia crouching and cooing encouragements as he slithers closer to the new shell, Shadow Weaver with her arms crossed over her apron, perusing her visitors in silence. The whole exchange is asinine, a waste of their time, but she keeps the shell anyway, a rare pop of pink in her garden to accompany the peonies along the eastern wall.

She keeps the snail's name too. One less thing for her to think about.

×××

It rains again and the grounds are too soggy for her to comfortably walk the forest. Portions of the castle feel more unwelcome by the day: the cellar where Micah lurks, waiting to speak with her, the study room where she helped Castaspella in a moment of irrational weakness, the balconies overlooking the courtyard, where she dare not risk seeing Catra and Adora coiled up together again. The guards' eyes follow her in the hallways, and most of the Princesses still glare when they cross paths.

Glimmer and Bow nod politely when they see her, and Perfuma and Scorpia attempt to force conversations that she doesn't particularly want to have. She catches Adora watching her from time to time, pensive and pitying, but the cat by her side, Melog, flares his mane a furious red and they turn away from her.

The kitchen is generally safe from prying eyes, and the staff doesn't speak to her when she retrieves her dinner plate from the steel bartop. The food here is at least passable, significantly more flavorful than any of the Fright Zone's ration bars, but they could still stand to use more spice. Shadow Weaver holds her plate of white-sauce pasta and mushrooms sprinkled with black pepper, and considers that her own tolerance for spicy food has increased since her resurrection. She supposes her original taste buds were incinerated too.

Come the harvest she wonders if the cooks could find use for her vegetables. She hasn't offered, and she's not certain they even know what she grows in the greenhouse, but she would prefer finding them a purpose than leaving them to rot on a trash heap somewhere. But she's not certain they trust her enough to eat anything she's grown. She _is_ rather apt with poisons, though they've never struck her fancy, not that anyone here would know that. Poison suits her aesthetic and repertoire, and no one here knows enough of her preferences to vouch for her otherwise.

_Who would anyway?_ She imagines Adora standing before the chefs, smiling broadly, _"Oh, Shadow Weaver doesn't poison food, only minds."_ She hums thoughtfully as she grabs a fork from the clean silverware pile, amused by her own absurdity.

Behind her the double doors to the kitchen swing open and her throat constricts at once. Castaspella and Catra walk side-by-side, chatting casually about something Shadow Weaver cannot hear. She retreats to the far side of the room, half-hidden behind the stacked trays of resting dough for tomorrow's breakfast. Castaspella's fingers graze through Catra's brown hair, delicately admiring the length of it, and Shadow Weaver hunches in confusion and jealousy. The contact and admiration make Catra swell with pride, and Castaspella looks down at her lovingly, her halo glinting in the yellow light, and she grabs them both a plate for dinner, an easy, maternal gesture that twists a brutal knot in Shadow Weaver's stomach.

She knows at once that Castaspella has collected Catra too: another lost child to adopt with knitted sweaters and socks, another orphan to protect, all to fill the gaping hole in her own heart.

Her plate clinks against the countertop, her dinner untouched, and she leaves through the service exit with a bitter scowl on her scarred face.

×××

It's terribly late one night when she finds Glimmer alone in the hallway where once she found her aunt, in the same ghostly, distracted posture, standing before the statue of Queen Angella. But where Castaspella sealed herself off, Glimmer's emotions burst at the seams: her lips twist in sorrow, fingertips quivering against her pink night shirt. She gazes up at her mother's likeness and openly weeps, her shoulders shaking, unable to hear Shadow Weaver's approach over the sounds of her choked breaking. 

The jarring sense of estrangement strikes her hard, the sensation that she should not witness this moment, the same as she felt with Castaspella. But she softens her face and strides forward: she would do better with Glimmer. She would be compassionate.

"Queen Glimmer," she greets her quietly, but she still startles, her arms wrapping around each other, the gesture the same as Castaspella's. Did she raise her? How often did she look up at her aunt, an inspiration, a safe haven, a queen in her own right? 

"I'm sorry," she wipes her eyes, soft as a lamb. "I thought I was alone."

There is always the burden of royalty, the fact that she has her own mask to wear, heavy with the weight of leadership. Shadow Weaver could help bear the load, an advisor, a respite. It's what she does best: take care of the messes that tangle beneath a leader's feet, the brambles that will trip them eventually without proper tending.

"Have you slept at all tonight?"

Glimmer swallows and her voice grows firm, a sovereign not deigning to answer trifling questions, and she counters, "Have you?"

Shadow Weaver shrugs, her arms crossed. "No, though this is rather more normal for me than for you."

Glimmer has no retort for that, but shifts her weight uncomfortably. They stand together facing forward beneath Angella's marble wings, the heaviness of her loss like a millstone around their necks. In her heroism she left behind a void for the rest of them to fill, an unknown darkness where she used to shine and illuminate all their paths.

"When I asked you," Glimmer begins, struggling through the words, "what dying felt like—" She shakes her head, hair glinting in the moonlight, failing to quell the tears pooling again in her eyes. "I wasn't trying to be rude. It was because of my mom. I just didn't— I just didn't want it to hurt."

Her voice breaks pathetically, a childlike whimper lodged in her throat, and Shadow Weaver looks down with a surprising knot in her chest.

The inferno of her death haunts her nightmares, the pain of her skin ripping and melting, a supernova that scorched from the inside out, the torment so powerful she could not cry out, her scream lost in the ashes. Then the quiet and the nothingness, a plain white page, ruined by the ink stains of her second-first breath. It was the rebirth and the dripping dread of her survival, the irrefutable proof that there is not a shred of mercy in this universe, that hurt far worse. The pattern repeats and will not let her rest, and she wonders if she will ever be rid of this sadness.

But she imagines not all deaths are the same, and only half-lies when she murmurs back, "It doesn't hurt."

She sees a spark of comfort on Glimmer's face, of resting and satisfaction, and the expression warms her. The princess' question is answered for now, and she sniffles until the tears fall down her flushed cheeks like an overfilled cup. She cracks, biting her lips, and cannot maintain the charade of strength a moment longer. Glimmer doesn't have a mother, she doesn't have a queen; she has slipped into her skin and inherited a power she never wanted, and she flings herself forward into Shadow Weaver, collapsing, shaking, and small.

Shadow Weaver tenses but tries not to stagger back, suppressing the fear that tears her away from Glimmer's searching arms. The shock of her touch a sudden reminder of her own corporeal form, an aspect of herself she'd much rather forget— why could she not keep her magic and relinquish this body?— but at least it is being put to use after nothing for so long. She embraces her in return, long fingers resting above her small, downy wings.

_They'll grow,_ she thinks unsteadily _. They'll bloom one day_ , _like her mother's_.

She holds Glimmer tightly as she cries, staring up at the statue of Angella, and hopes she is doing this correctly.

×××

On one particularly balmy day there is another red flash of movement in her greenhouse, so she sweeps into the door with wry smile, a new trowel from Perfuma in her hand.

"Have you gone shell hunting again—"

Her words catch like silk on thorns, tangled and stuck in her mouth, as she stares not at Scorpia, but at Catra, alone in the shadows of the verdant foliage with lowered ears and folded arms. The horror of her presence fades quickly, replaced by surprise and fury, ashamed at being caught off-guard. The sight of her alone is a rarity, as she always travels with her cat or Adora, or one of the other inhabitants of Bright Moon.

They have avoided each other for nearly four months, always on the periphery of the other like repellant magnets. Each time Shadow Weaver stumbles and they somehow collide, her with Catra and Adora, she uncovers another layer of something that she hates. Another of her miserable mistakes glaring her in the face, a monument to all the things she lacks: love, tenderness, empathy. The confirmation that she would never be a mother to them.

"I've been talking to a lot of people about you," Catra begins in her low rasp. "About what you are now, and what that means if I'm going to be around you." She keeps her distance, walking toward the herb garden where Little Buddy slides up the trunk of a lemon tree, higher than he usually climbs. "How I'm supposed to act around you."

"Might I suggest grateful?" Shadow Weaver snaps. She buries her trowel in the soil beneath a row of sage, desperate for a distraction.

Catra takes a deep breath and ignores her outright, though the fur of her neck stands on edge. She grits out, "I can't change you. But my healing process is completely outside of you."

She doesn't know from whence this new sense of calm stems, this novel self-control from the cadet who trashed the sleeping quarters, deep gouges in the metal bunks from her deadly claws, not once but _twice_ after her battalion failed missions. She postured and disobeyed and screamed at Shadow Weaver at every possible opportunity, a petulant, cruel girl with no vision, no purpose. She was clever, at least, quick on her feet.

"If you want to be part of my life in any capacity, then you need to take ownership of your past actions," says Catra, "and apologize."

"Apologize?" She barks a laugh, "I have always given you _more_ than you deserved."

"No," Catra's voice shakes. "I deserved better. I deserved kindness."

"You are an arrogant girl who was always a burden—"

"You used me."

"Jealous of Adora—"

"I _love_ Adora!" she shouts.

Suddenly, her hand reaches out to pluck Little Buddy off the tree, his brown shell pinned between the sharp claws of her thumb and index finger. Her chest rises and falls rapidly; she could impale him, skewer him as easily as she breathes, and she looks up inquisitively at Shadow Weaver, a challenge on her face.

"You don't care about anyone but yourself," says Catra. "I can't make you love me, and I don't need that from you any more."

Her lip twitches and she gazes flatly at the snail, as heartless as she ever was. Shadow Weaver can bear the tension no longer, the taut, fearful cord in her heart, and she lurches forward on her knees, her arm outstretched— she is terrified, losing control, she wants to stop her; but she _cannot_ touch Catra again, she won't lay a hand on her body; she won't; she promised— and she heaves, "Don't hurt him!"

Catra's two-toned eyes dart from the snail to Shadow Weavers hands, balled tightly against her own chest to keep her from reaching out to touch her, and her confused face warps into comprehension; the admission that this creature is small and useless but very important to her. The image of the dead garter snake flashes before Shadow Weaver's eyes and panic simmers beneath her skin. Catra is as cruel as mother was. She will kill him out of malice. Why does Shadow Weaver admit this weakness? Why does she never learn?

But Catra crouches and slowly sets Little Buddy beside the trowel in the soft dirt of the garden, safe and sound.

"I'm not like you," she says, standing upright. "I'm getting better."

She leaves Shadow Weaver in the greenhouse, hunched beside her herb garden in a mortified stupor.

×××

She rushes to the library in a frenzy, and literally corners Castaspella with a violent sneer on her face. As Shadow Weaver stops before her, much too close and direct, her dress whips at Castaspella's ankles and she flinches back, her shoulders tilted as she leans away; an echo of their clash in the forest all those months ago, before she revealed so much to her about the Crystal of Arxia. She scowls back just the same as she did before, her eyes and lips dark, fury bubbling up and painting her pale cheeks red.

It was so much easier then to remain detached and levelheaded. Beneath her mask she could be anything, but here she is desperate and ugly, all accusations and cutting words.

"Did you send her in there to goad me?" Shadow Weaver spits.

"What?"

"You sent her there to force some sort of apology out of me, as if _she_ has never wronged _me_?"

"I don't even know what you're talking about," Castaspella flourishes her hands dramatically.

"Catra!" Shadow Weaver hisses. "Catra invading my greenhouse-"

" _Your_ greenhouse-"

"-and demanding I apologize, and for what? For keeping her ungrateful head from rolling at Hordak's feet-

"Enough!" Castaspella rises to her full height, still half a head shorter than Shadow Weaver, but her posture leaves no room for argument and the timbre of her voice drops an octave, "Adora and Catra are not obligated to give you _anything_ — not their time, not their forgiveness, not their affection— and I would never ask them to be near you after hearing how you treated them. You are a _parasite_ , here only because of their mercy. If Catra wanted you gone, I would see it done in an instant." 

The library is deathly still, the only noise the sound of their heated, heavy breathing.

"You do not get to stand here and pretend you kept them alive out of love or kindness. You provided for them because they were _useful_ to you. And beyond that, what good are they?"

_"What good is reading? We can't eat words," her mother said._

And she realizes, all at once, what she has done. The tidal wave crashes down on her head and she sways back, out of Castaspella's face, her mind reeling. She drowns on the thought that this is a diluted version of what her mother did to her, after she made all those quiet promises in the gnarled tree roots to never be that way, to never do to another soul what was done to her, to never abuse another's kindness. And that's what it is, after everything is said and done; she can admit that to herself now.

Abuse. Warped like she warps everything, just twisted enough to offer herself excuses. She put a roof over their heads. She kept them from starving. But she exploited them just the same, fed off of their abilities like mother fed off her childrens' thievery.

"It doesn't have to be like this," says Castaspella gently.

But she has shaped Catra into herself, into a second scrawny Beatrix from a time before she was named Light Spinner, before she was named Shadow Weaver, with her split lip and hungry stomach and a headless snake at her feet. Catra is not her mother. Catra is not her. She doesn't crush harmless animals in her fist; doesn't taunt neglected children when they're already aching.

Shadow Weaver's dull eyes fix to the ground and she turns away, her steps faltering. Castaspella calls out to her with sudden concern, but she hears none of what she says, the only sound in her mind her mother's words, repeated over and over again.

×××

For two weeks she does not garden. She stays in her bed, lethargic but sleepless, without the energy to rise again.

Micah's notes come regularly, sliding beneath her door. She leaves them there, not bothering to read them.

Bow brings her books and food too, but she doesn't speak when his broad shoulders fill her doorframe, even when directly addressed. He leaves the food behind with a sad expression, noting that she hardly ever touches it.

Glimmer, Perfuma, and Scorpia check on her too, all three of them together, and they stage an awkward conversation about buying her new clothes, maybe some gardening gloves, before even that fizzles out beneath her pervasive silence and they leave, dejected.

Adora knocks on her door only once, asking for tentative permission to enter. When none is given, she murmurs, "I hope you're okay." Then she turns away.

×××

Magic no longer spirals through her body, but she feels a sense of premonitory wrongness, the soft hair raising on the back of her neck, after a small tremor shakes the castle late one evening. It's not even large enough to worsen her cracked ceiling, but something about it ebbs and flows in her mind, as if it is the ripple of something larger, something worse, and she feels only the echo of the outermost ring, its concentric waves vanishing as the energy dissipates.

The castle rumbles and groans, then all is quiet for much too long. There are no voices in the corridor assessing the damages, no shattered vases being swept up. It feels like the night before battle, the tension of waiting for an offensive strike, when the Horde soldiers paced their barracks sleeplessly despite their orders to rest. She knew the hypocrisy of such a command, though she gave it anyway. She couldn't sleep, and neither could Hordak, bellowing in his laboratory, furiously smashing his prototype weapons as quickly as he built them.

The quiet agitates her like the relentless itch of poison ivy until at last her curiosity wins out and she leaves her room. Her body is weary and achy from being sedentary and starving for so long, but she eats a piece of stale bread from the night prior and some water from an old bottle. The food washes away the dull throbbing behind her eyes, and she sets out, her knobby knees still somewhat unsteady.

There is no one in the hall or the kitchen or the greenhouse. There is no broken glass or shattered pots, no damage to control. She cannot find another soul, nor an indication of to where they've disappeared. Even the guards permanently posted in the courtyard entrance have abandoned their positions. As she slowly tours the empty castle the uncanny silence swells a new form of terror in her heart, and she wonders if this is a fever dream, some strange hellish nightmare where she has finally gotten her wish and died, but ended up in a purgatory all her own.

She swallows thickly, worrying her lip, and returns to her room to hide until an hour later, the bubble bursts.

×××

The commotion explodes out of nowhere: shrill voices in the hallway shouting commands, the clatter of heavy metal armor as guards scramble outside. She closes her book at once, but before she can rise from her bed, the door to her room flings open.

Micah stands before her, his black hair covered in chalkwhite dust, his face etched with shaky terror in place of his normally unflappable calm. He drags Castaspella into the room, her arm slung over his shoulder, both of their hands injured, scraped and bleeding, palms raw with torn skin. Tear-tracks run down Castaspella's dust-coated face as Micah leans her in a high-backed chair, kneeling beside her, breathing hard.

"What is this?" Shadow Weaver asks, and her voice wavers in a way she has never heard before, weak and frightened. "What happened?"

"The north tower fell," Micah intones dreamily, softly, as if he himself doesn't believe it yet. "There was an earthquake. It collapsed."

Castaspella sobs, her face in her hands, the keening sound muffled as she hunches down into her lap.

Shadow Weaver rises, slowly approaching, her voice lodged in her throat, her own heartbeat overpowering every sound. Incomplete fragments of thoughts ravage her mind: the north tower, gilded and white, the students' dormitory, where she once lived, in ruins. The death toll, as populace as Castle Bright Moon. The children. Bile burns her throat: their anchor spells didn't hold, as predicted. She had her own premonition after all.

"Please help," Micah says hollowly, eyes red. "I have magic left. I have to go back. There are people in the rubble."

Shadow Weaver blinks as her heart twists in her chest. She has no magic; she isn't strong anymore. She can dig with her hands, but nothing more. "I— what do you need me to do?"

Micah's tears fall down sharp cheekbones into his salt-and-pepper beard. His hand rests on Castaspella's shaking shoulder. "Watch her," his voice breaks. "Take care of her. Don't let her go back. She's done too much. She'll kill— she could hurt herself if she goes back. Please."

At once she sees the arcane drain of Castaspella's face, the sallow skin and gaunt expression that reads like prolonged dehydration. She cannot fathom the prodigious amount of energy Castaspella must have spent to put herself in this condition; her magic stores are undoubtedly massive, impressive in every regard, but to push herself to the limit of her reserves toes the line of suicidal. Shadow Weaver knows exactly how that grim story ends.

"I will," she says.

She doesn't know why he's trusting her with his sister's life unless she is his only remaining option, his last choice, but a promise is a promise. "Thank you," Micah breathes, and he leaves the room as quickly as he came, returning to the ruined north tower of Mystacor.

×××

Castaspella pulls her knees into her chest, making herself small in the chair the same way she did in the study months ago. Tears pour freely, silently, through the dust and bloody handprints on her face. Her hair is tangled and matted, her robes torn and stained with grey and red. Her trembling hands dig into her neck, an ineffective garrote, and the starry halo of the Head Sorceress is nowhere to be seen.

Shadow Weaver takes in the details of her body with sudden urgency: they are alone now, and she is responsible for this drained, catatonic woman who shivers in her reading chair, eyes replaying the horrors of broken stones and bodies, the tragedies she couldn't prevent no matter how much she sacrificed or how hard she worked.

She takes a deep breath, alive with purpose, and steps quickly to the bathroom to wash her hands and soak a towel. She wrings it out in the sink, returning to Castaspella and kneeling at her feet. She wipes the grime from her face without hesitation or argument; she has a job to do, and she will do it with single-minded efficiency. She tears up one of her shirts for makeshift bandages.

"Let me go back," Castaspella whispers, leaning into the damp towel with empty eyes. Her lips are parted, dried blood in the corners. "They're trapped. Let me go back."

She does not respond to her, tilting her face by the chin instead, ignoring the way her fingertips tingle with contact and fear. It feels wrong to touch her in any capacity— she doesn't have her permission, she has Micah's— but she cannot leave her filthy and wounded.

" _Please_ , Shadow Weaver," her voice breaks, a wan, pathetic sound. "Please let me go back."

Her eyebrows knit together but she does not answer, instead cleaning her forehead, her cheeks, looking anywhere but her red-rimmed eyes. The towel lowers to her hands, gentle against her torn palms and bloody fingernails, cleaning and wrapping her wounds with the utmost care.

"This is my fault," Castaspella's breathing grows increasingly labored and she chokes on her words, lunging forward from the chair, her eyes wild. " _Please_ , let me go back."

Shadow Weaver catches her as she tries to rise, clenching her teeth. They stand together, her arms wrapped around her shaking frame, holding her in place as she struggles, another miserable embrace full of tears. Castaspella writhes against her violently, one arm trapped against her chest, weakly pounding her bony sternum. The lack of force behind it burns a clear hole through Shadow Weaver's mind: there is no strength left in her, no sense of self-preservation. The symphony of her magic is mute.

"I hate you!" she bellows, wild and raw. The veins in her neck pulse and she screams through hysterical sobs, " _Let me go_!"

_It's better this way_ , Shadow Weaver thinks, holding her more tightly. _You can hate me._

Better her than Micah or Glimmer or Adora. She knows how to accept hate and rejection, and how to live with it anyway. There is a poetic necessity to her hard heart and the fact that the universe won't allow her to die, as she would not allow Castaspella to die. Her wiry body isn't strong, but she can overpower her now, in this maimed condition, drained of nearly all her lifeblood, her arcane energy. This is the loss Shadow Weaver knows like the back of her own scarred hands: a well with no water, dry and useless.

Castaspella screams, inconsolable, her fingers tearing at her shirt, anything to hone her rage and grief into usefulness, and when Shadow Weaver remains still, refusing to obey or fight back, Castaspella shatters. She clings to her, knees buckling, sobbing into her chest like her niece did a month ago, a gasping, broken thing. One hand slides up the back of Castaspella's head, a flat palm against the base of her skull, steadier than she feels, and she pulls her closer until she calms.

When Castaspella is reduced to bone-weary, hiccupping whimpers, Shadow Weaver pulls away just enough to guide her to the bed, sitting her on the edge and unzipping her tattered mage robes. Her own shirt is soaked with tears and dirt and blood, but she focuses on Castaspella's filthy clothes first, removing them considerately and dressing her in a soft nightgown. Cuts and bruises litter her body, her milky skin unused to physical injuries. But Shadow Weaver would not ask, not today, perhaps not ever, how this damage came to be: if she had been there when the tower fell, or hurt herself pulling bodies from the rubble.

She lifts Castaspella's feet into the bed and slides her beneath the sheets, her gaze fixed onto the ceiling, helpless in her exhaustion. When she is completely overcome by her drained magic, her eyes close into a fitful sleep, arms prickled with goosebumps from the shock to her system. Shadow Weaver rises from the foot of the bed and changes into her own pajamas, cleaning herself in the bathroom, watching through the mirror's reflection for any sign of movement from Castaspella. 

But she remains on her back, tucked firmly beneath the comforter, shivering faintly. A trill of apprehension sounds in Shadow Weaver's mind: she wants to warm her, to comfort her, but she knows she shouldn't place her ravaged body beside her in the bed. A disembodied voice reminds her that she doesn't know how to do this; this is not her reality or expertise, and Castaspella would never accept her compassion as genuine, even if it is. And as she sits on the opposite side of the bed, a pained expression on her face while she watches Castaspella's unsteady breathing, she thinks with shocking sincerity that it is.

Suddenly, Castaspella whimpers and babbles, pleading for help, terrified of the visions that linger in her nightmares, white sheets clenched in her injured hands, and the dam breaks. Shadow Weaver has no other tangible way to help, and she has a job to do.

She crawls into bed beside her and rests a hand on her arm, heavy against her silk nightgown. Her heart pounds when Castaspella's hands reach out for her in return, clinging to her wrist, her shoulder, her neck, anything she can safely latch onto; and she lets her, remaining perfectly still, green eyes wide against her pillow. But it isn't until Castaspella moves closer, curling into the space against Shadow Weaver's chest, shaky breath dancing against her collarbone, that she settles again. Her tremors subside completely as a scarred arm wraps around her shoulders, protective and gentle.

Shadow Weaver lies beside her, keeping watch, keeping her warm. She can be still and quiet, and soothe her when she sobs, and though she has never held anyone through the night before, her pulse quickens with the thought that some aspect of her might be worthwhile, might be _redeemable_ , because for all of her shortcomings she can at least care for Castaspella.

She watches her all night, adjusting to the movements of her body and the tension in her sleeping face, careful not to disturb her. She tells herself that she wouldn't have slept anyway.

×××

> Like any unloved thing, I don't know if I'm real when I'm not being touched.
> 
> -Natalie Wee, "Our bodies & other fine machines"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your patience and support with this fic! Your kind comments are so motivating!


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